


Disillusionment

by Wallwalker



Category: Final Fantasy IV
Genre: Character Study, Dragoons, Gen, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-12
Updated: 2013-07-12
Packaged: 2017-12-19 05:37:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/880045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wallwalker/pseuds/Wallwalker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What can a man do once he's bested the one he once prayed to?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Disillusionment

**Author's Note:**

  * For [imadra_blue](https://archiveofourown.org/users/imadra_blue/gifts).



> Prompt (imadra_blue): ... I'd like stories exploring the monsters, the effects upon the land, the interactions between the different worlds and/or the summon monsters. 
> 
> I focused on Bahamut and the Dragoons for this take on it.

_"Lord Bahamut, Father of Dragons, protect us."_

Every day as a young man Kain had fallen to his knees and bowed his head, offering an invocation that his father had taught him long ago - the same invocation that the Dragoons of Baron had offered up to the dragons for as long as they had existed. His father had faithfully said that prayer before their training for every day that Kain remembered. So had his father before him, and on through the Dragoons, until the very beginning of their order. He knew the tales well.

The Dragoons were dedicated to their training and to their draconic patron. They had honed their bodies for leaps of faith that would carry them high into the skies, and what magical abilities they possessed were devoted to shaping and riding the winds around them. Bahamut was the master of the skies, or so they had been taught, so powerful that he had learned to break free of his home and its oppressive gravity to make his home upon the Moon. A Dragoon powerful enough, the legend had said, would someday do the same. They would break free of their planet, not through sorcery or through the works of engineers. They would become greater than men, and like dragons themselves.

That was the tale. But having travelled to the moon and found his way back, Kain was beginning to find that the truth was far more complex than any legend could be. And what he had learned had made him doubt things that he had believed his entire life.

For instance, he would never speak to anyone about his own experiences with Bahamut. He never offered prayers before he trained anymore, and he trained in secret, so that there was no chance for anyone else to see him and ask him why. What could he say - that he had met Bahamut on the moon, battled him in combat and won? That by the end of the fight _he_ was the last man standing, that he had leapt above the fires that Bahamut had tried to rain down upon him and struck him down with his spear? 

Or was he the one that the legend had spoken, he who had set foot upon the Moon and battled its creatures and returned to tell the tale? And if he was, what would that mean to the others who still held out hope? What would that mean to the neophytes who still whispered his name to each other with awe and fear?

There was no point in praying to a god who was no god at all. Bahamut had accepted them as his betters. He had accepted Rydia as the summoner - the only summoner - with the power to call him. How could Kain pray to a being whom had bowed and admitted submission to him in the end? 

The Dragoons had once said that the Red Wings and their blasphemous creations would someday destroy their way of life, and that the reliance on the powerful sorcery of Mist or Mysidia would lead to the wreckage of their faith. Magic was a tool, as was technology; Kain's own father had railed against the inevitable as the Red Wings became a power, because he had feared that both could easily become a crutch, and replace the need for them to develop the power within themselves.

Kain, who had once raised his spear to the very being that Richard had bowed his head to every day of his life and _lived,_ bore an even more terrible burden. He had lived to see that his father had been right.


End file.
